Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Check out this article in the latest Journal of Light Construction, an excellent magazine for Home Builders and a source of great info for all residential architects and consultants as well. It is written by a local builder of all things sustainable and good, Dan Kolbert, and describes a recent project we completed together in Falmouth, Maine for our excellent clients, Stew MacLehose and Kathy Hayden. Kolbert is quickly becoming one of the top sustainable home builders in the region. He already has a LEED Gold and a LEED Platinum under his belt. Time to loosen that belt another notch, Dan...

This project is on track for LEED Platinum Certification. It features cellulose-filled, double stud walls, triple glazed windows and an exceptionally tight envelope in the range of BrightBuilt and Passivehouse (0.77 ACH5o). It has solar hot water and is slated to get some PV on the roof soon too.

We will soon make available live energy data on this project as well, in the same format as our BrightBuilt data, through our friends at Powerdash.

BrightBuilt Barn Media Kit

About the BrightBuilt Barn

Here we follow the design and construction of a Net-zero energy barn built in Rockport, Maine - the result of a 2 year long collaborative effort between architects, builders, high performance building experts and a visionary client who wanted to make a small building with a LARGE impact.

This building is, and was always to be:SustainableAffordableReplicableEducationalDisentangledand of course, Beautiful

The BrightBuilt project is unshakably committed to two overarching concepts:

Our commitment to Sustainability

1. We believe that, for the first time in human history, the scale of human activity threatens to outstrip the capacity of the global environment to absorb its effects.2. Consequently, we hold that each of us alive today bears a special responsibility to work toward a way of life that can sustain human life indefinitely, so that we leave a world where our grandchildren may have grandchildren.3. We conclude that our reliance on fossil fuels is unsustainable in the long run, and may need to be eliminated in our lifetime if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change.4. We are convinced that buildings contribute significantly to adverse global climate change, due to the greenhouse gases that are emitted as a consequence of their construction, as well as the greenhouse gases released in generating the heat and power that are consumed in heating, lighting, and otherwise running them.

For all of these reasons and more, we dedicate ourselves to discover, improve, and publicize sustainable ways of designing, constructing, and powering buildings.

Our Commitment to Open Source Collaboration

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."Eric S. Raymond from his essay, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” on the advantages of open source methods of software development

1. We embrace the methods of open source collaboration, which have given the world such world class products as Wikipedia, the Mozilla web browser, the Linux operating system, and the Apache web server, among many others.2. We believe that the methods of open source collaboration, although they originated in the field of software development, are perfectly general, and may be applied to any field of intellectual endeavor.3. In our view, the essence of open source collaboration consists of the application of many minds to a common problem, with free sharing of ideas, the elimination of proprietary barriers, and the successive application of many small improvements.4. We believe that open source collaboration promises to be the fastest, most practical way to achieve rapid evolution of ideas for sustainable building design and construction.5. Our hope is that by sharing what we’ve learned with others, they too will embrace and necessarily improve on these building systems that we have put forth. We look at the first BrightBuilt Barn not as “the solution”, but rather as one step in the great, ongoing evolution of the Sustainable Home within a global context. If this first BrightBuilt model is not largely obsolete within 10 years, we will have failed in our mission.